The Administration, he said, would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells; emergency contraception; sex education; or prison, mental and global health issues. Top officials delayed for years and tried to water down a landmark report on second-hand smoke, he said.[…]

“Anything that doesn’t fit into the political appointees’ ideological, theological or political agenda is ignored, marginalized or simply buried,” Dr. Richard H. Carmona said Tuesday in testimony before a House committee. During his 2002 to 2006 stint as surgeon general, Carmona said he was also ordered to mention Bush at least three times on every page of his speeches.

There are news stories that just sort of fly by, so saturated are we in news that some relatively stark items just sort of fly by.  The basic problem with a frequently updated blog is that its dual duty as a report of important or quasi-important events and a ledger of commentary clash: Here is an important item that I have no particular comment to make which everyone else has.  Unless I happen to stumble onto some other piece out of the zeitgeist where the whole of the two pieces are greater than the sum of the parts.
A group of Christian protesters tried to shout down a Hindu clergyman who was invited to give the opening prayer during yesterday’s session of the Senate. Capitol Police say they arrested three people after they stood up and started yelling “this is an abomination” when guest chaplain Rajan Zed invited the Senate to join him in prayer.

The protesters’ concerns, according to the website of a Mississippi group that was trying to mobilize opposition to Zed’s appearance, were based on the fact that Hindus worship multiple Gods.

“It was a shocking event for all of us Christians,” the Rev. Flip Benham, head of Dallas-based Operation Rescue/Operation Save America, tells The Hill. “For all of these years we have honored the God of our Founding Fathers. It wasn’t a group of Hindus, Buddhists or Muslims that came here. It was Christians.”

The protesters, two men and a woman, face misdemeanor charges of disrupting Congress, according to the Associated Press. “We are Christians and patriots,” one of the men told a reporter before he was dragged out of the Senate gallery.

Benham issued a press release that criticizes Congress for allowing a Hindu chaplain to join them in prayer. “Not one Senator had the backbone to stand as our Founding Fathers stood. They stood on the Gospel of Jesus Christ!” he says.

I do not exactly know what to do with those protesters, but after a quick spell I realize that these two stories are indeed related.  Start with the political current that results in the demands for a Surgeon General to abandon stem cell research or sex eduation — and as the case is with the Surgeon General appointee under the microscope right now — that the Gay is an abomination — and then move to the more stirring similarity of their immediate demand.  Bush had that surgeon general mention Bush at least three times a page, the Invocation of Bush’s name was that important to float into the ether and enforce the word of George W Bush.  For the “Christian” “Patriots”, the invocation of Jesus’s name was of utmost importance, the reason they needed to attempt some feeble groundswell of opposition to the Hindu ecumenical prayer (of which nobody much anywhere could give a rat’s butt) to enforce the word of Jesus Christ.

Now I better understand Bush’s evangelical appeal.

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